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What happens to a mother who loses her child? More interestingly, what happens when he suddenly returns, all grown up? In British novelist Courttia Newland’s gripping tale, a London mother barely survives the shock when eight-month old Malakay is snatched from her husband’s car as he fetches some Chinese take-out on the way home.

Twenty years pass. Beverley Cottrell notices a strange boy tracking her around Portobello Market, and is frightened — no less so when he claims to be her lost child. Can it be true? Can she endure another seismic shift in her life?

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Beverley has long since shed her marriage, her suburban home and her teaching career, to begin life in a London housing estate. Her mental state still fragile, she seems most secure in the after-school class she teaches to housing estate kids. She can afford to volunteer — she has independent means thanks to her “clever father” — so she tries to reach “children on the margins, the ones I feel need it most.”

Her students — richly observed souls with troubled lives typical of their time and place — gradually become her substitute family.

“Miss, what do people write for?” they ask, startling her into truth. “They write because they want to make sense of their pain,” she says, and so she begins writing the journal we are reading.

Her students bask in the glow of her approval — and why not — who else is going to praise their thoughts about war (from the vantage point of their own war zone) or ask them to write about their fathers, after reading a Raymond Carver tale? And though Bev claims not to be a real writer, sprinkling her journal with random-seeming lists, Post-it note wisdom, and scientific quotations, she does a pretty good imitation of one.

The scenes she conjures — her guilty recurring dream about a long-ago Barbadian childhood when her family began its material ascent, fights with the sister who dismisses her housing estate students as "those feral children," and the visits of Seth, the policeman who worked on her child's kidnapping case and has become her lover — are polished and true.

What really throws us — and everyone in Beverley’s present-day life — is her sudden euphoria when instinct tells her that the boy pounding at her door in the middle of the night, with his bad smell and worse grammar, is, in fact, her lost son.

The young man — he’s called Wills now — tells her about finding newspaper clippings about his kidnapping in a locked trunk and a confession by the old man who raised him, but offers no other evidence.

Skittish, he forbids contact with the police. He’s a street “yout” as Bev’s students would say — wearing the uniform of “high-top sneakers complete with protruding tongue. . . drooping jeans, thick cuffs, garish T-shirt,” bright sport jacket and matching baseball cap, very much like the kids she teaches.

After Bev accepts this tough, potentially dangerous, sometimes sweet young man into her home, she must face friends’ and family’s scorn and scolding. “Regression” thinks her therapist. But the saddest rejection comes from the students she has fought so hard to rescue. “You can’t trust him. . . Man’s dodgy,” they say, speaking from experience.

As Bev confesses in her journals to events that make her appear less than the fragile idealist she first appeared, Newland’s tale gathers pace and tension. Violence becomes a real possibility. Happy ending or sad? Newland delivers a bit of both in this complex, cathartic portrait of an intelligent, if not always sensible woman, who refuses any longer to be defined by loss.

Nancy Wigston is freelance writer and frequent contributor to these pages.

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